Poll Suggestion: Schizophrenia

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According to the dictionary, schizophrenia can be define as:

"a serious mental illness in which someone cannot understand what is real and what is imaginary."

Some movies portrayed this serious mental disorder for a certain way we know the reality about this disease and to understand a bit what many people with this disease suffer. It's not easy to play a character schizophrenic, it requires a lot from actors to make the character credible.

dgranger from what Nikolay explain me "Schizophrenia does not imply a "split personality" or "dissociative identity disorder" – conditions with which it is often confused in public perception".

So, your suggestions it's more "dissociative identity disorder" than schizophrenia.I've already deleted some picks of the list because they doesn't fit on this mental illness however Thanks for your suggestions.

I would argue some of the picks, because while Bateman's mindset suggests schizophrenia, it's hard to say what is the case there, while The Narrator in Fight Club (1999) is definitely not schizophrenic: he has a dissociative personality disorder and, as Wikipedia states it rather clearly: "Schizophrenia does not imply a "split personality" or "dissociative identity disorder" – conditions with which it is often confused in public perception". Apart from what is associated with his second personality covering its tracks Narrator seemingly has little to no hallucinations and generally thinks rather clearly. I'd rather argue that Donnie Darko is schizophrenic as well (because he likely is only from the point of view of most people), but he as diagnosed in the movie, so that counts.

It should be noted that schizophrenia is one of the fewer mental illnesses which actually has a number of physical neurological symptoms.

Thanks for correcting me. From what you said and from the research I did to find out more about this mental illness, I realized that I was not sufficiently clear about this, I thought that "DID" in some part could also be considered schizophrenic, but now I know I was wrong...

...and you are right about "The Narrator" in Fight Club (1999) his problem is more derived from insomnia than schizophrenia. His lack of sleep makes him stand on the edge between being awake and sleeping, which as a consequence makes him unable to differentiate what is real or imaginary and this causes him to impersonate his alter ego Tyler Durden. In a way it's quite common for us to create an alter-ego, I think we create an alter-ego in our dreams in order to escape from what we are in reality. We create a fearless, powerful character, without fears, without worries contrasting in a way what we are in reality. On his case because he can't sleep, he has this outbreak of personality.

In fact, our body is programmed to sleep in order to recover the daily wear, if we are somehow deprived of this we are prone to have insomniaPs: About Patrick Bateman it's not clearly but the movie suggests that in part he have multiple mental illness and schizophrenia is one of them, is that what i think.

Schizophrenia means "split mind" because it was originally thought to result from a basic splitting of cognitive associations. To be diagnosed you need 2 out of 5 symptoms, one of which must be 1,2, or 3.. 1: Hallucinations, 2: Delusions, 3: Disorganized Speech, 4.Grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, 5.Negative symptoms, such as diminished emotional expression.

American Psycho should not be on this list as he is cold and calculating, the opposite of psychotic, and he would be diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder and/or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I don't know most of the other movies but Shutter Island, A Beautiful Mind, and Black Swan would be correct. Another example of someone with schizophrenia in a film would be Let's Scare Jessica to Death or Frank from Maniac 1980 (but neither should be on this list as not enough people have seen the former, and not many would feel empathy for the latter).

Well actually Bateman's diagnosis (American Psycho) would depend on if you think the killings actually happened or not, so schizophrenia could be correct, but his behaviour throughout is consistent with the personality disorders mentioned

But then again Bateman definitely does not have symptoms 3,4, or 5.. and thinking you killed people when you didn't would be a delusion. If the only hallucinations you have are clearly linked to your delusion, then they do not count as an additional symptom. Thus, his only psychotic symptom would be a delusion and he would be diagnosed with delusional disorder...

Delusional Disorder Diagnostic Criteria:

The presence of one or more delusions with a duration of 1 month or longer.

Criterion A for schizophrenia has never been met.

Note: Hallucinations, if present, are related to the delusional theme (e.g. the sensation of being infested w/ infects associated w/ delusions of infestation)

Apart from the impact of the delusion(s) or its ramifications, functioning is not markedly impaired, and behaviour is not obviously bizarre or odd.

I LIED. I think I figured it out, its been a while since I've watched this movie but I think I remember Bateman does cocaine.... People with Antisocial Personality Disorder (a psychopath basically) are chronically bored and are sensation seekers because they need higher levels of stimulation to be amused; and they like to do drugs and also have a stronger reaction to drugs as a result. One of the most common side-effects of cocaine is cocaine psychosis.... SO I think Bateman has Antisocial & Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and his hallucinations are a result of cocaine psychosis. :')

You made good points. I kind understand the points that you made to unavailable the presence of this mental ilness on him.Since there's difficult to determine if he is or not schizophrenic and he is more likely to have those mental ilnesses that you said,I will deleted him from the list.

and mentle ilness lol wow u dum nieve fucking retards u don't understand who i am do u Iim a good person and mently stronger and speritly stronger then any one of u dum fucks I'm glad u guys think this is a game I'll show u a game and every name talking shit I'm taking your shit

Now I understand why people think he was robbed by an Oscar for this role. I'm not saying that Dezel did not deserve it, because for me he was great on "Training Day", but I can see the oscar go to either side.

Crowe was great in the portrayal of a mentally affected man but the reason I loved his performance (though I hated the film) had little to do with schizophrenia.

Problem with many movies about this disease or split-personality disorders is the directing. Ron Howard shows us the very hallucinations Nash is victim so from our standpoint, what Nash sees is real or at least feels real, like the little girl, the roommate, the secret agent, they feel real so whatever makes Crowe's acting terrific has nothing to do in my opinion with the fact that he's suffering from dissociative identity disorder because we're put in his mind literally and thus his behavior seems "normal" because we can cinematically relate to it.

If I see a character speaking with a policeman, even if it's a figment of the character's imagination, I still see a man wearing a police uniform and the interaction looks normal. If I see the character speaking with an invisible person, I know there's a problem. If I see the policeman in scene 1, and later the same scene is shown without the policeman, I'll understand the character's mentally troubled but it will work more as a plot twist, a revelation... than a disease or a serious disorder the director invited me to contemplate.

I didn't see all these performances but I think the best possible portrayal of schizophrenia shouldn't rely on narrative tricks that show us directly what the protagonist sees... but directors are so tempted to tease the audience and toy with our perceptions or use special effects that they always take the easy choice, especially contemporary directors.

That's why the best portrayals of mental disorders are without any special effects or hallucinative tricks, movies like A Woman Under the Influence, it wasn't about schizophrenia but well, it's just to make a point.

I didn't like Shutter Island though I appreciated the way the twist tied the plot together, I don't think Scorsese was concerned in the depiction of mental disorder so I didn't really analyze the film from that 'angle', I just thought it was a salad of cinematic clichés that could appeal to someone who never saw any film of the last twenty years. I'm sure the movie looked terrific on the big screen but overall, it was a waste of terrific casting and great cinematography.

Actually, salad wasn't meant as a bad thing, the bad thing was "savorless" salad, I respect your appreciation of the film, here's what I personally thought about it :) (that was before "Wolf of Wall Street")

Guess who praised Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island"? Roger Ebert! The cinematography, the spooky atmosphere, the film noir's overtones, the whole psychological torment, the "buried trauma" to quote him, as so many voices speaking in favor of "Shutter Island", another great achievement from the greatest director of his generation.

Marty might be the greatest as the most consistent director of the New Hollywood generation but I hate how 'great Marty film' started working like a pleonasm, as to underline a tacit rule that any movie made by a great film-maker automatically deserves the benefit of the doubt, in other words: if you hate it, you didn't get it. I'm sorry again, but the director who committed this cinematic piece of unoriginality is not the passionate artist who enriched cinema with so many masterpieces, like "Mean Streets", "Raging Bull", "Goodfellas" and such delightful little gems like "The King of Comedy" or "After Hours". I'm sorry but Marty didn't gain in maturity, not even in craftsmanship, he purely and simply... lost his touch.

I have the biggest respect for Scorsese, and also for Ebert, and the reason I mentioned the latter is because he's certainly Scorsese's number one fan, but he's also one of these privileged persons who've seen so many movies in his life that he would be the least likely to get so easily impressed by a film, that blatantly exploits every single cinematic cliché, considering the story's material. The movie is so 'obvious' that it would be tragic if it wasn't so laughable. And it's obvious because it works on that reverse effect, as movie fans, we know that whatever seems obvious in the first act will probably be contradicted. True BUT whatever seems obvious is exactly the opposite of what is shown during that very first act, because we know we're being tricked by the director. In that case, it's like Scorsese was the 'sprinkled sprinkler', and Ebert's implicit denial of the script obviousness says a lot about his recurrent loss of subjectivity whenever it concerns Scorsese.

I don't want to number all the clichés: the two detectives investigating, the entrance in the island with a haunting atmosphere emphasized by an ominous music, begging you to be scared, or impressed, a weird feeling of unrealism in some backgrounds that made me question what the artistic approach was, let's just call it 'homage' to old-school cinema, this one never gets old. But I wouldn't have expected this emphasis on the tone, screaming "Beware danger" not even from old-school directors, and certainly not from Hitchchock. Okay, we got the idea that something will go wrong; it doesn't even trust our patience as Di Caprio acts weirdly from the very first scenes. I was pleased by Ben Kingley's performance as the charming head doctor, but it's getting old since Nurse Ratched and I didn't mention Fritz Lang, because there are less risks that he might be known by the targeted audience.

And I'm not even implying that the movie is not worth watching, but it plays like an overlong build-up for a weak climax, a build-up, during which nothing very pleasing happens. And I mean 'pleasing' in the pleasing meaning of the word, seriously. What happened to Marty's sense of entertainment? Why such a constant need to be dark, Gothic and gloomy? Is that Cinema's new emotional trend? Are we supposed to endure this atmosphere during the whole picture? Can't we have a break? a distracting element, not necessarily a comic relief, but I don't know, a subplot, an interesting character, even Hitchcock did it no, again, the time-filler relied on the guilty trauma, the good old theme so cherished by Marty, and that provides the best alibis to rationalize his films. And we discover his wife played by a beautiful Michelle Thomas, and some horrific flashbacks featuring the Nazi's atrocities, always a good taste to combine the supernatural horror with the real one, that's what the movie needed in case we thought we would cheer up at the end. Or was he just surfing on an opportunistic wave introduced by Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds"?

The weaknesses of the plot canceled out all the cinematographic attempts to justify the movie's cinematic merit. Nothing special happens, nothing really happens, and again, it's so damn hard to feel sympathetic toward Leonardo Di Caprio! Yes, I have a big problem with Di Caprio in Scorsese's film, because of that same constipated face he has to display, to remind us that he's playing a tough guy. Did Bogart look tough? Di Caprio is a good actor, even great sometimes, but this is becoming one of his most annoying trademarks. I miss the young, lively Di Caprio with sparkling eyes and youthful look, because tough he isn't, and he doesn't fool anyone, and this is probably why the only Marty's movie I thought he delivered a great and flamboyant performance was "The Aviator". The first thing I see in a Di Caprio film now, is the poster, tough-guy-constipated-face? I avoid.

An indigestible film with a risible attempt to scare us, I will stop here because I'm tired of being so critical about the director whom I praised most of his work from the 70's to the 90's. But he just doesn't do justice to his glorious filmography, Scorsese is a man of gripping realism of psychological torture and it doesn't need a supernatural flavor to taste good, it's scarier when real and more than that, Scorsese is a damn entertainer, with a unique talent of storyteller, and not only the story isn't told well, but it's not even a good story, as far as originality is concerned.

And when comes the final scene, with the final line, supposed to summarize the whole message of the film and justify the whole build-up, my only reaction was : "so, we got from that ... to that?!" and this is my exact feeling when I compare between Marty's earlier and later works.

the best part is I'm tracking where and who running this site and shit this isent a fucking game understand this is my life I am God u dum fucks Jon F NICKOLAY is god and if u want to find out let me no and gess what I'm getting on a plan the snoring to personally come and kick the fuck out of the person running this site and take all his shit

I personally loved the way that Martin Scorsese made the movie but i get it your point of view...I can understand what bothers you.For example many people loved Mulholand Drive, Donnie Darko and I didn't like.

In America, “KKK” or “The KKK” doesn’t stand for laughing. In this country it stands for ether, in baseball, three strikes, your out, or, in American society, The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacy racist group. It is pronounced as separate letters. “The”, “K”, “K”, “K”. The hate and hate filled actions of the Ku Klux Klan is not funny at all.

Despite decades of horrific crimes committed under the various banners and symbols of the Ku Klux Klan; in more recent decades Klansmen have been comically mocked in cinema. Bad Boys II and Django Unchained are two examples. The pilot episode of Dave Chappelle's show is the principal television example.

So I apologized for using 3k's because you're probably going to think that this might be related to that. My intention was not this.
That's why afterwards I've written "Kkkk" with 4k's, we normally do not quickly connect the number of (K's). It can be with 2..,5, 6... 10.
But like most of you are Americans , I immediately explained the means of my word and my intentions were not referring to this racist group.
It was a misunderstanding .

The use of (K's) like "Kkkkk" in Portugal and in Brazil it means a type of laugh.

Right, SeventhAr7. I never thought you meant Ku Klux Klan by it, but naturally I would think of them every time would see "kkk", due to their notoriety. I'm sure there are people out there who have "K.K.K." for initials; perhaps a "Keith Kyle Kaplan" or so.

I must admit that I played a second with the idea of K.K.K. in your comments, so I asked to give a chance to clear the situation. I didn't know that it stands for laughter in your country. Now I know, that kkk does not always mean Ku Klux Clan, which is strictly forbidden in Germany as anticonstitutional and that with justification. But to calm you down, till the second was over, I thought that this surely must be a mistunderstanding. So I later asked straight.

Thank you for making clear that isn't your intention. In some countrys it might be a little 'dangerously mistakeable' to use this shortening. Not all people know about your Kkkk shortening. :D A policeman in Germany got fired very quickly, because it came up that he sympathized with the Ku Klux Clan.

I must admit that I played a second with the idea of K.K.K. in your comments, so I asked to give a chance to clear the situation. I didn't know that it stands for laughter in your country. Now I know, that kkk does not always mean Ku Klux Clan, which is strictly forbidden in Germany as anticonstitutional and that with justification. But to calm you down, till the second was over, I thought that this surely must be a mistunderstanding. So I later asked straight.

Thank you for making clear that isn't your intention. In some countrys it might be a little 'dangerously mistakeable' to use this shortening. Not all people know about your Kkkk shortening. :D A policeman in Germany got fired very quickly, because it came up that he sympathized with the Ku Klux Clan.

Sorry, I wanted to remove the double-posting and re-post it as only one text, but the getsatisfaction-page seems to refuse the correction. so if any administrator can fix it, you might do that. Thank you. :)

Ok, but could you explain, what "try kkk" means to the question of Mr. Torin at the reply we ommented to? Should that mean he shouldn't worry about and take it easy and laugh about it? Sorry, I'm not so into english that I could have understood this.

Ok, but could you explain, what "try kkk" means to the question of Mr. Torin at the reply we ommented to? Should that mean he shouldn't worry about and take it easy and laugh about it? Sorry, I'm not so into english that I could have understood this.

No, it doesn't mean that he needs to laugh.
The "giggling" it's a like "I had the same dilema" because on this list there are good performances which makes hard to pick.
You know, when there are so many thing that you like and someone say that you need to pick just one.

I'm English, which makes difficult to explain what I tried to say. Sometimes I don't find the English word to describe what I was trying to say because in every cultures there are certain expressions.

That explanation is good enough for me. ;) Maybe the best would have been 'same deal'? But don't judge me by this, I'm no person of english mother language. I would have written 'Same deal.' But that maybe be a wrong use of the words, I know.

This poll and similar, if any exists, really deserve to be forgot at last.

You step in the field where incorrect information or a cup of wrong subjective measure may provoke a mentally unstable person or persons to the point of no return.

If the existence of DSM-IV, DSM-IV-TR and DSM-5 is out of your knowledge, it is preferable not to touch the questions concerning psychiatry. If you don't know the diffference between DSM-IV and DSM-5 in the field of schizophrenia, it is better to avoid this term.

There are some general terms that are mostly enough to express the theme on public: mentally unstable, mentally disordered, mentally ill people. In every-day use, as in this poll, we may see all the Phobias and Anxiety disorders, Depressive disorders, Dissociative disorders, sometimes Autism spectrum conditions - all of them called "Schizophrenia" for wrong. "Schizophrenia" is a diagnosis, so let it be characterized and announced by professionals in the field, not to drown disorienting the people who experiences lighter disorders.

Someone may argue we talk only about movies here. Yes, and let it be so and stay in the frame of cinematography. If I see "schizophrenia" or other psychiatric or medical term in the product itself (official posters, trailers, titles, dialogues, pictures filmed), no problem to appeal this in lists, polls, discussions in the same way as the producers did. At least, it counts for them to be honest (or not) to invite professional consultants when working out the concept of production.

Someone may like an entertainment itself more than any professional opinion... OK, let's examine the above poll taking no Patricia R. into account. The Fisher King is Fantasy, while Inception and Donnie Darko are Sci-Fi, all concerning mental but not disorders. What a ?.. It seems the movies are just not seen or not understood to be in this poll. Further - "better". Take Shelter and Black Swan - if they show schizophrenia, the great half of humankind are schizophrenics.

Chill...
The main goal of this poll is to put movies that are trying or assuming dealing with this mental illness.
No one here is a psychiatrist, directors or producers aren't psychiatrist, actors aren't with schizophrenia...

So in your words, no one can do this from the start? This is not a poll about who's favorite movie dealing with this. QUESTIONING this is not ethical.
This is about who's performance from the actors make you feel more intrigued to know more about this mental illness. If you create empathy for the performance you are more willing to search to know more about and at certain aspect analyze what you searched with the performance himself.

This is the point of this poll. These movies are assuming dealing with this mental illness... It wasn't a reflection of my own ideas.

If everything we made upset anyone, we wouldn't do anything. If you treat something with respect and awareness what are the problem??

Tabus are to be broken... Movies dealing with Racism, LGBT?? In your case can't be talk?? If I am white I can't made or talk about for example a poll dealing with the acquisition of rights from black people on the last century?? If I am hetero I can't made a poll about "LGBT movies" because I'm not on that oriental sexuality??

The point is that there is zero evidence that some of the characters on the list have been diagnosed or qualify to be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. I would be a lot more respectful to avoid using the word "schizophrenia" if you want to retain certain items on the list.